A French citizen who held in Indonesia at a death sentence since 2007 due to a drug offense left a prison to return to France as part of an agreement concluded between both countries.
Serge Atlaoui, 61, was accused of being a “chemist” and arrested in 2005 at the Jakarta factory, where dozens of pounds (pounds) of drugs were found.
The agreement was reached between Indonesia and France on January 24 to extradite a father of four on “humanitarian basics” because he has cancer and received a weekly hospital treatment.
“It’s a miracle,” his wife Sabine Atlaoui told RTL Radio. “He survived 19 years in prison. He survived the execution.”
The 61-year-old will surrender to the French police at the International Airport Soekarno-Hatt in Jakarta, before boarding a commercial flight to Paris.
On his return, Atlaoui will be handed to prosecutors, “and is most likely retained while he is waiting for a decision,” Atlaoui’s lawyer Richard Sedillot told AFP.
Atlaoui told his family that he did not want to meet them at the airport, his wife said.
“She wants to see her family again when she’s free,” she told RTL. “Unfortunately, we don’t know how long it will take.”
In France, the maximum punishment for a similar crime for 30 years, he told Reuters, the Minister of Human Rights Indonesia Yusril IHZA Mahendra.
Paris will be the approval of “flint, amnesty or reduced penalties,” he said.
Atlaoui, a welder from Metz in northeast of France, has always denied that he is a drug trader.
He claimed he had installed the machines at the Acrylic factory, but he told the AFP in 2015 that he “thought there was something suspicious.”
Originally sentenced to life in prison, the verdict was appealed to the appeal by the Supreme Court of Indonesia.
His execution was scheduled for 2015but paused thanks to the pressure of the French government.
